Quotes from Greg L. Bahnsen

To reason with the non-Christian in a fashion purporting to be independent of God or independent of reliance upon revelation is to honor the unregenerate's notions of "evidence" and "verification" as legitimate and correct. However, for the Christian, it is Scripture that governs *every* aspect of his life, even his concept of "evidence" and the way he reasons with skeptics.

Humble submission to God's word must precede man's every intellectual pursuit.

We must not defend our message (that Christ's Word is self-attesting and possessing ultimate authority from the Lord) with a method that works counter to it- by claiming an ultimate epistemological standard outside of Christ's Word of truth.

There are no facts or uses of reason which are available outside of the interpretive system. The argument must pit the unbeliever's system of thought as a unit against the believer's system of thought as a unit. Their overall perspectives will have to contend with each other.

It is important for the apologist who desires to be obedient to the Word of God in defending the faith to pay special attention to the fact that throughout Scripture, God's veracity is not defended, but accepted from the outset on His authority. Unless we have more wisdom than that contained in the revelation of God, we should take the same attitude.

The foundation of knowledge is God's revelation.

There is no man made in the image of God and living in God's world, whatever God's attitude toward him and his own feelings about Christ, who does not know the living and true God, his Creator. All men have the requisite knowledge of God to make them eternally responsible before Him; this was true in the Garden, and it does not cease to be true after the fall. Sin or no sin, special revelation or no special revelation, all men inescapably know their God.

To avoid Christ in your thought at any point, then, is to be misled, untruthful, and spiritually dead.

There is no environment where man can flee to escape the revelational presence of God (Ps. 139:8).

If we will not have inscripturated morality from God as our sociopolitical standard, we have no principle to protect us from those who wish to play god.

All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are to be found in Christ; thus if one were to try and arrive at the truth apart from commitment to the epistemic authority of Jesus Christ he would be robbed through vain philosophy and deluded by crafty deceit (see Col. 2:3-8).

The Older Testament commandments are not mere artifacts in a religious museum, nor are they ideals suspended over an age of parenthesis and appropriate only for the coming day of consummation. They are the living and powerful word of God, directing our lives here and now.

Now if the teaching of Moses is inspired and Deuteronomy 13 and 18 tell you that future revelations must be judged according to previous revelation, and if the alleged future revelation of the Quran conflicts with the previous revelation of Moses, who has to go? By their own logic who has to go? The Qur'an has to go. Those who advocate the worldview of the Qur'an are not able to live according to their own worldview, there's this inconsistency

If vou choose the airline of autonomy you're going to have to end up where you don't want to be, illogical, immoral, unfree with no dignity. And at that point the choice is between life and death. Spiritual life and death, moral life and death, intellectual life and death.

The Lord said to Job: Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct Him? Let him who argues with God answer Him!… Would you condemn Me to justify yourself?" (Job 40:1-2, 8). God is not in the dock; we are. His word and character are not questionable; ours are.

God's revelation is more than the best foundation for Christian reasoning; it is the only philosophically sound foundation for any reasoning whatsoever. Therefore, although the world in its own wisdom sees the word of Christ as foolishness, "the foolishness of God is wiser than men" (1 Cor. 1:18, 25).

Christians need not sit in an isolated philosophical tower, reduced to simply despising the philosophical systems of non Christians. No, by taking every thought captive to Christ, we are enabled to cast down reasoning that is exalted against the knowledge of God (cf. 2 Cor. 10:5). We must challenge the unbeliever to give a cogent and credible account of how he knows anything whatsoever, given his espoused presuppositions about reality, truth, and man (his "worldview").

The unbeliever attempts to enlist logic, science, and morality in his debate against the truth of Christianity. Van Til's apologetic answers these attempts by arguing that only the truth of Christianity can rescue the meaningfulness and cogency of logic, science, and morality.

Christian apologetics is a defense of religious faith, thus pertaining to the question of one's ultimate commitment in life. Apologetics entails intellectual reasoning in justification of one's beliefs, thus touching on the epistemological question of the final standard of knowledge.

Van Til's presuppositional approach: (a) locating his opponent's crucial presuppositions, (b) criticizing the autonomous attitude that arises from a failure to honor the Creator-creature distinction, (c) exposing the internal and destructive philosophical tensions that attend autonomy, and then (d) setting forth the only viable alternative, biblical Christianity.

The "greatest" commandment teaches us to love the Lord our God with all our minds, too (Matt. 22:37) – to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5).

The believer and the unbeliever recognize two different final standards for living including that aspect of living known as thinking, reasoning, and arguing. They are divided by their ultimate commitments, either to Christ or to some other authority (usually themselves).

A person cannot have it both ways regarding his final standard or ultimate reference point. He presupposes and reasons either according to the authority of God or according to some other authority. Attempting to be neutral about God's ultimate authority in determining what we know is a result of a bad attitude toward God's ultimate authority. It is a way of saying that one does not really need the work of Christ to save him in his reasoning.

Apologetics involves a conflict over ultimate authorities — that is, a conflict over our presuppositions or final standard. What should be the source of a person's presuppositions? For the unbeliever, it will be some authority for reasoning other than the word of God, while for the believer it is God's revelation.